AMT Emerging Technology Center - Digital Transformation

What's Now, What's New, What's Next!

Consumer digital technology has revolutionized every aspect of our lives, but it is just beginning to transform the advanced manufacturing industry. This AMT ETC highlights the digital manufacturing revolution in action.

Visitors experienced many digital manufacturing innovations, from free operating standards for machine shops and connected machines to cyberphysical security, developed by leading technology organizations including:

Exhibit Highlights

The feature film The Digital Transformation of Manufacturing embodies the ETC theme “What's Now, What's New, What's Next” and focuses on the industry's challenges and opportunities. Forward-thinking technologists examine major shifts in markets, technology, agile manufacturing and revolutionary design strategies. Topics included the changing landscape of methodologies, materials and digital communication on the factory and industry level.

An MTConnect-enabled system demonstrated a physically and digitally connected vertical CNC mill, a ROS-I (Robot Operating System-Industrial) interface and an articulated robotic arm that autonomously transfers the milled part to a CMM. This many-to-many interface enabled system showed how data sharing creates a closed-loop system. Using data from the CMM, the CNC can compensate for tool wear by recalculating its offsets to maintain tolerances closer to the median of the specification.

CISCO displayed their connected view of a smart factory and how it can communicate, share and access information across all tools, machines, operators and managers.
A visual data wall showed a unified plant-to-business network, tested and validated to support standard industrial Ethernet protocols along with an IT security platform. The exhibit showed how network simplification can reduce network maintenance costs, and how reliable plant connectivity enables collaboration and innovation.

ATHENA, from industry technology incubator, iTSpeeX, is the first universal, voice-operated assistant technology specifically designed for manufacturing work. ATHENA enables operators to interact with machine tools using simple voice commands and can work on all machines, regardless of brand.

AMRC – Advanced Manufacturing Research Center, Sheffield, England

The Digital Transformation of Manufacturing

This video focuses on the challenges and opportunities in the Future of Manufacturing and the Digital Factory, covering major shifts in markets, technology, agile manufacturing, and revolutionary design strategies.

Digital transformation is the change associated with the application of digital technology in all aspects of human society. It has affected manufacturing for decades and the near future will see DT kick into high gear.

The video highlights the views and perspectives of key thought leaders and doers, including what's now, what's new and what's next.

AMRC – a Video Profile

The AMRC is a network of world-leading research and innovation centres working with advanced manufacturing companies around the globe. AMRC is transforming industrial and economic performance by making steep changes in productivity, increasing competitiveness, developing new products and processes and training new talent and skills.

Located in Sheffield, England, AMRC has a global reputation for helping companies overcome manufacturing problems and has become a model for collaborative research involving universities, academics and industry, worldwide as well as preparing the next generation of factory engineers for the present and future.